When the clock surrendered to the dark hush of midnight and sleep abandoned her entirely, Lili dressed up slowly and slipped into the dim corridor where wall lamps flickered with a weary glow. A few guards lining the hallway acknowledged her with polite nods. The moment she stepped past the doors and into the open night, everything changed around her entirely.
The courtyard pulsed with murmured orders and movement of soldiers pacing in steady, disciplined strides.
She paused, momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer density of motion and intention.
One of the nearby broad-shouldered, clean-cut guards noticed her presence and approached with a nod that was both respectful and measured.
“Evening,” he greeted. “You’re Gifted, right?”
Lili inhaled to answer, but his second question chased the first with earnest curiosity.
“You on night watch tonight?”
Caught somewhere between amusement and confusion, she let a soft, self-conscious smile curve at her lips. “No. I just… couldn’t sleep.”
The guard’s shoulders loosened almost visibly. “Ah. Yeah, that tracks. First few nights here feel like sleeping inside a storm.”
That earned a small laugh from her. “Yeah. It’s… definitely different.”
He studied her for a moment, then tilted his head with a hint of curiosity that broke through his practiced neutrality. “So… what do you think of the place? The base, I mean.”
She hesitated. Her senses were still adjusting to the movement, sound, and simmering energy woven across the courtyard. Slowly, she let her gaze drift outward, sweeping over the barracks, the training ground where shadows of soldiers moved in coordinated arcs, the towers rising sharply into the star-washed sky. She took in the scent of cold metal and distant sweat, the subtle undercurrent of fear and readiness that seemed to beat through the place.
“It feels alive,” she said eventually. “Heavy and intense, but… alive in a way that makes your thoughts feel louder.”
A contemplative silence stretched between them, warm despite the chill.
A shiver forged of instinct slid down her spine. Her breath stilled mid-inhale. Her vision shifted before the thought even formed—gold rising in her irises.
She scanned the shadows, reading the subtle breeze of movement, the delicate fractures in silence, the unnatural pauses between footsteps.
And then she stilled entirely.
Something caught her attention.
Lili reacted before thought could lace itself into meaning.
A flicker—wrong, cold, jagged—shifted at the edge of her golden sight, and instinct roared through her veins. Something peeled out of the darkness—skin rippling, bones cracking, a creature folding itself back into human shape. A man’s silhouette emerged, feral grin glinting beneath the courtyard lamps.
Goran immediately lunged.
Lili barely twisted in time to knock the soldier aside, her arm slamming into his vest as she redirected his path. He hit the ground with a grunt.
Goran’s strike collided with her ribs instead, sending her flying backward. Her breath ripped from her lungs in a hoarse gasp as she was thrown across the courtyard. She hit the outer wall of the base, air exploding from her chest before her body slid down.
Alarm sounded an instant later.
Soldiers fired. Goran laughed as his skin darkened, hardened, became a shifting mosaic of scales that devoured each incoming shot with mocking ease. The bullets pinged off harmlessly, scattering across the courtyard.
“Scales—he’s scaled up!” someone shouted. “Switch to suppressors!”
Lili forced herself upright, palms bracing against the cold stone below, her body trembling from the impact. Pain radiated through her ribs in hot waves, but she pushed up, teeth clenched, shadows flickering erratically at the edges of her vision.
Goran stalked closer. “You thought you could hunt me and walk away, bitch?” he growled. “Did you really think you could win and be left unmarked?” His smile widened, cruel and carved with memory.
Lili inhaled sharply—felt the world collapse into a narrow, trembling ring around them.
Shadows fluttered behind her ribs, restless, panicked, answering the instinctive flare of fear with their own feral hunger. She reached inward—consciously this time—grasping for that slippery thread of darkness she barely understood. It twisted beneath her grasp, wild and unwilling, but it stirred.
The shadows trembled around her unpredictable and Lili felt them thrum beneath her skin with a volatile.
Goran’s eyes narrowed, something feral and calculating rising beneath the fury. Long, barbed tail unfurled from behind him.
“Well,” he snarled, rolling his shoulders as the tail snapped beside his leg, “let’s see if you can dance.”
He lunged.
The tail lashed toward her ribs too fast, too sharp, too unexpected. Lili’s body dissolved. She slipped into a streak of living shadow. The world around her distorted, voices muffled.
She reformed three steps away, stumbling back into her body with a gasp.
“What—” she choked, wide-eyed.
Goran’s grin sharpened. “You’re evolving.”
But there was something like irritation behind the smile.
Before she could process, Goran spun using the tail’s momentum to launch himself like a scaled spear. Lili barely raised her arms as the tail crashed down toward her, but this time the shadows instinctively surged upward, forming jagged tendrils that wrapped around the barbed limb.
The shadows didn’t hold for long. They cracked like glass under pressure, but they slowed him enough for her to kick upward, heel smacking his jaw and sending his head snapping back.
He roared, grabbing for her, but she recoiled, sweeping one hand in a wide arc.
This time the shadows obeyed eagerly. They flung themselves outward in a long, slicing wave and whipped across Goran’s torso. The force of it made him grunt and stagger backward, the scales there barely forming in time to prevent the strike from cutting deep.
Lili stared at her own hand stunned, breath trembling.
Goran spun again, tail thrashing, claws outstretched, scales blooming across his legs, stretching over his shoulders. He darted toward her, claws aimed at her throat.
She tried to dodge, but her shape turned fluid again. His claws sliced through the fading impression of her shoulder.
She reformed behind him, knees hitting stone with a jolt.
Goran whipped around, tail gouging a line through the ground as he swung it toward her again. She rolled aside, the tip missing her by inches, tearing a trench through stone.
“You always were quick,” Goran spat, tail coiling, claws flexing as he stalked toward her in a slow arc, “but now you’re slippery in all the worst ways.”
She tightened her fists, feeling the shadows coil there.
“And you’re ugly in all the worst ways,” she breathed.
He roared and charged.
Lili threw her hand forward and the shadows burst outward in a spiraling, long-range strike. It slammed into Goran’s chest with the blunt impact of a battering ram, forcing him to dig his boots and tail into the ground just to keep from being thrown completely off his feet.
He snarled, braced against the blast.
“You think that’s enough?” he spat. “I’m not done—”
Another shot cracked through the night.
Suppressors finally loaded. But in the chaotic dance of movement, one nervous soldier adjusted too fast, fired too soon. A suppressor round streaked toward her.
Lili barely saw it. But the shadows did. They rose, forming a dome around her. The suppressor hit the shadow-barrier, splintering it, punching through, but enough to slow it down for Lili to throw herself sideways and avoid the impact.
Goran laughed. “Oh gods,” he crooned, delighted. “Look at that. They’re already shooting at you. Switching sides was fast, but even this side doesn’t appreciate you enough not to aim for your spine.”
“I don’t need them to appreciate me,” she murmured in low trembling voice. “I just need them not to get in my way.”
She surged forward again while Goran’s barbed tail swept through the air in a savage, curving arc meant to cleave her in two. But before his tail could strike, the ground beneath him erupted.
From the cracked earth, skeletal hands burst upward—jagged fingers of bone clawing around his ankles, yanking him mid-step with a force that jarred even his balance. He snarled in surprise, twisting sharply just as a fireball roared from above and slammed into his shoulder, bursting in an explosion of sparks and heat that sent him staggering sideways.
Lili jumped back instinctively, shadows pulling her out of the blast radius. She whipped her gaze to the side soon after and found Cova sprinting toward her. Soldiers rifles lifted once more, narrowing their aim at the scaled attacker who writhed and snarled within the skeletal grasp.
“Hold your fire!” Notori’s voice boomed through the night.
Fire coiled around his outstretched palm. Without waiting for the soldiers to fully lower their barrels, he launched another fireball straight at Goran.
Goran shrank into a black cat, darting free of both skeletal hands and flames in a single motion.
“I’ve got him!” Lili shouted.
She lunged toward the darting silhouette, golden eyes illuminating her path. The shadows surged around her arm, eager to strike, ready to pin Goran before he could escape again.
The base floodlights exploded to life. The burst of light stabbed into Lili’s eyes. She gasped, stumbled and threw an arm over her face, shadows sputtering and breaking apart as the world dissolved.
“Lili!” Cova rushed to her side, hands gripping her arms. “Lili, are you alright?”
Lili dragged in a breath, blinking hard against the burning whiteness tearing across her sight. Everything felt too loud, too bright, too sudden—the floodlights knifing through the raw edge of her senses.
“I—I can’t see,” she ground out. “The lights—dammit—”
Notori dropped down, landing beside them. “He ran,” Notori said. “Slipped right out from under us. Fucking coward.”
Lili blinked again—her sight slowly swimming back into shape. With a sharp inhale she forced her focus outward, sweeping the courtyard with the remnants of her golden vision.
“I can’t track him,” she finally said in frustrated voice. “He’s gone. Completely gone.”
Notori cursed under his breath.
Cova exhaled shakily, turning toward the cluster of soldiers who still held suppressors trembling in their hands. “No one fires again unless I give the order,” she snapped. “We’re done with accidents tonight.”
The youngest soldier swallowed hard as he forced his shaking hands to lower the weapon, the barrel dipping toward the ground.
Lili straightened agonizingly slowly, each movement dragging a ripple of pain through her battered body: ribs throbbing with every shallow breath, her right shoulder burning, her legs unsteady from where her back had slammed against the wall. And that was all it took for her shadows to burst outward.
They unfurled instinctively swirling around her in a low, throbbing haze that hissed across the ground.
Instantly, Cova and Notori tensed.
“Lili,” Notori breathed, stumbling a step closer. “Lili—breathe. You need to breathe.”
But her lungs stuttered, catching halfway, and the air felt like fire.
Her eyes glowed—too bright, too red and her shadows twitched at the slightest movement around her.
Before she even managed to pull that first grounding breath into her wounded chest, the soldiers reacted to the motion, to the glow, to the way the shadows snapped.
With a rising rustle of metal and fear, their weapons lifted again…
Cova took a step in front of Lili, hands raised in a sharp, protective arc.
“She just saved your lifes!” Notori raised his voice.
“Yes, she did.” One of the soldiers agreed. “But the Gift without control is still a threat.”
And Lili, watching the exchange, tried her hardest to take the shadows under control.
Her shadows snarled at first rippling through the air. It lashed once, twice, tasting the fear around her, answering the threat before she could smother it.
But Lili pushed back hard dragging her trembling hands toward her chest in a slow, desperate sweep, fingers curling as though she were gathering the shadows by handfuls, forcing them to obey, commanding them, pleading with them. Her breath fractured in her throat, sweat beading at her hairline.
The shadows hesitated, shivered, then, inch by inch, they stilled, their movements growing sluggish and reluctant as they recoiled.
Dark tendrils began to curl inward, folding themselves toward her ribs, sliding back along her spine with the uneasy glide of smoke being drawn through a narrow crack. The air around her lightened, tension loosening by a thread.
One more breath. One more heartbeat.
A single, sharp shot cracked through the night from somewhere behind her, slicing through the fragile quiet she had stitched together. Her body jerked before the round struck.
The suppressor hit her between the shoulder blades. The shadows around her collapsed at once.
Her power vanished first—a sudden, hollow emptiness that punched straight through her center, leaving her insides ringing. The world spun sideways, sound smearing at the edges.
Her knees buckled. Consciousness followed her powers, slipping from her grasp in a dizzy, downward pull…
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